Sleep Time
by Haberdashing
Summary: Transcendence AU. Dipper on dipnip attempts to attract a sleeping playmate.


_Move._

 _Bright. Clean. Quiet._

 _Safe._

 _Home._

 _Home good. Better than not-home. Not-home not good._

 _Ground cold._

 _Bored._

 _Want play. Want friend to play._

 _Where Friend?_

 _Cry._

 _Pause._

 _Friend not come._

 _More cry._

 _Still no Friend._

 _Friend must not hear._

 _Find Friend. Make Friend play._

 _Close eyes. Sniff. Feel._

 _Upstairs._

 _Walk. Sniff. Look._

 _Friend!_

 _Friend not moving._

 _Loud cry._

 _Nothing._

 _Still not hear._

 _Friend not hear lots._

 _Poke Friend._

 _Quiet. Warm. Soft._

 _Wait._

 _Friend sleeping._

 _Friend does that. All do that. Sleep normal._

 _Friend not want play time._

 _Friend want sleep time._

 _Snuggles._

 _It can be sleep time._

 _Sleep good for Friend._

 _But play time later._

 _Lie down._

 _Yawn._

 _Sleep._

And he slept.

Dipper woke up with a headache, and not the fun kind, the pain-is-hilarious kind, the kind that made him grin at the excitement of feeling any physical sensation at all. This was the kind that hurt more than it amused, that made it hard to think, hard to focus.

Why were there still summoners who thought that exposing a demon to Yggdrasil was a good idea? Had it been any other demon, the summoning would have ended in tears and bloodshed, the summoners tortured and slaughtered with extreme prejudice.

But with him…

Dipper groaned and turned to greet the current Mabel reincarnation, who was this time not a human but a large fluffy cat with a long, ridiculous moniker that he abbreviated simply as Star. Her fur had gotten all over his suit and his face, and the act of sitting up disrupted the dander enough to tickle his nose into a sneeze.

For once, though, she couldn't tease him about his "kitten sneezes". If anybody sneezed like a cat this time around, it was Star, though that role reversal wouldn't last for long.

The pain in his head was accompanied by a pit in his stomach, the source of which the demon couldn't quite identify, his thoughts still fogged by the lingering remains of the Yggdrasil herb's effects. That stomachache wasn't a normal side effect of the herb.

Something was wrong.

Dipper ran his hands across the cat's spine and was struck by how still she was. Cats slept more than humans, he knew, and as the years dragged on Star needed more and more rest, but she was sleeping even longer than usual today. This was getting ridiculous.

He reached out into her mindscape, ready to enter her dreams- simplistic though they always were in this lifetime, filled with treats and crinkly toys and colorful balls of yarn, made of sensation rather than story- but encountered nothing but a void, an absence where there should be sound and light and feeling.

As the demon stilled his hands, his claws entangling themselves in knotted fur, it suddenly struck him that her skin did not give off the typical comforting heat.

She was truly still now. Too still. Her legs did not twitch, her eyelids did not flutter, and her chest did not engage in its calm rhythm of rises and falls.

Dipper knew, now, the source of that pit in his stomach, that niggling feeling that something had gone terribly awry when he had been too out of it to notice.

Lady Star Mittens of Sparkle Town was no more.

He thought back, piecing together the remnants of thought from before his period of rest. She had been still and quiet and… _warm_. She had still been warm.

Which meant then that, though he had been unconscious at the time, Dipper had still been right there with little Star during her final moments of life.

How long had it been? Dipper counted on his fingers, amazed at how the decades- no, not even decades this time, just a few short years- had flown by. Her lives were always brief now, but this…

Oh, right. Cats didn't live as long as humans, did they?

He finished his count and reached an unsettling conclusion.

Star had fallen ill just shy of her thirteenth birthday.

Twelve years. That was all. The two of them had been together in this life for a mere twelve years.

Not long enough.

Never long enough.

Most Mizars were still maturing after twelve years had passed since their birth, but not Star. She had not only gone from childhood to adulthood, but had grown old enough that age and weakness and sickness had been enough to snatch her life away.

She hadn't even made it to thirteen.

No life should be that short.

And then, as the haze that filled his mind began to fade, Dipper was suddenly, painfully reminded of another life claimed at the tender age of twelve, another soul that had been transformed far too young.


End file.
